By Penelope GreenNEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE • Sunday September 30, 2012 6:00 AM

CATSKILL, N.Y. — It is a sign of Jared Handelsman and Portia Munson’s commitment to their art
that he has had Lyme disease three times and she has had it twice. It is also a sign of how
committed they are to their homestead: 83 acres of woodland and gardens that include a blueberry
maze. On Hearts Content Road, it can be hard to tell where the art ends and the homestead
begins.

Was that Handelsman’s work in the woods, those snarls of brush against the tree trunks? Nope.
They were left by the river in the summer of 2011, after it flooded during Hurricane Irene.

But if you look toward the hill near the graveyard, you might see a boulder as big as a baby
elephant, strung up with a steel cable and tethered to an oak tree. Handelsman, whose early
site-specific installations also recall Robert Smithson, is now devoted to photograms, using light-
sensitive paper to capture the play of headlights on leaves.

He throws himself into his work. He’ll crouch in the underbrush close to the road and wait for
cars to round the bend, then hold the paper aloft to snare the light, like a campaign worker with a
placard. (It’s a practice that has made him a magnet for ticks, among other wild things. On many a
dark night, he has found himself ringed by coyotes howling to their comrades farther afield.)

Munson has been amassing pink and then green plastic objects (dolls, hair curlers, egg cartons),
strewing them on tables or stuffing them into glass display cases, since her inclusion in the New
Museum’s “Bad Girls” show in the early 1990s.

Lately, however, she has become interested in blue plastic. Abutting an epically proportioned
woodpile (stacked in a spiral, thanks to her husband) is a Windex-blue aboveground pool that will
be the container for her next installation. Despite the heat, Munson’s family gave the pool a wide
berth all summer, disdaining it as an eyesore, but Munson has enjoyed floating in it while
pondering the elements of her next piece. In the 21st century, she says, plastic is just part of
the nature that surrounds us.

The hub of all this activity is a compact 18th-century farmhouse that has been in Munson’s
family since the 1930s. During the past two decades, it has been embellished by Munson and
Handelsman, both now 51, seemingly with a fierce mandate:
horror vacui (filling an entire surface with detail).

One bathroom is stapled with curling birch bark — Munson’s solution, she said, “to being really
broke and hating the tile.” In the living room, the walls are papered with stencils of flowers that
Munson made and then appliqued with hundreds of giant pink pansies she had scanned from greeting
cards and printed. An armchair wears bright blue fake fur, a la Cookie Monster.

There are a lot of gardens here, green “rooms” that unfold into more green rooms, circled with
cedar branch fences, arbors and porticos made by Handelsman, canopied with grapevines and the
branches of fruit trees. There is a bathtub in one, a shower in another. She and Handelsman moved
here 20 years ago, when the place was an uninsulated hunter’s lodge filled with beds and not much
else, and serviced by a hand-operated water pump. Her great-grandparents bought the farmhouse
during the Depression, moving here from New York during the dawn of the back-to-the-land movement.
Their children didn’t stay, migrating back to cities and suburbs.

“When we moved here, we just started making our life up,” Munson said. “It was exciting; it was
like making art. We came from middle-class families in suburbs, not a nature background, so we were
finding our life here and our art and sort of merging the two.”

They were quick studies. Handelsman cleared the woods, splitting the trees he cut into logs and
stacking them in spirals. Then, as now, they cooked their food and heated the house with a
wood-burning stove.

He worked as a stonemason and landscaper in neighbors’ gardens. He learned to harvest stones
from the woods, moving them with hand trucks and wheelbarrows, and laying out outdoor rooms with
paving stones and benches. In a mudroom, he used smooth round river rocks as tiles.

Renovating a 300-year-old farmhouse yourself on limited means is a slow process. About 18 years
ago, Munson and Handelsman learned that a New World barn — a rare and early form of Dutch immigrant
architecture — was going to be torn down nearby. They bought it for a few hundred dollars, took it
apart and laid it out in a field, where it remained for a few years while Handelsman learned how to
put it back together.

He laid a stone foundation that mimicked the original. Because the wooden nails that held it
together had to be ground out, he re-created them, cutting down hickory trees and whittling
pegs.

It took Handelsman almost eight years to finish the barn, which now houses Munson’s studio
upstairs and his below. Along the way, he built other structures, including a sugaring shack made
from an aluminum rowboat turned upside down.

But his magnum opus might be the blueberry spiral. Inspired by a tour of labyrinths in Britain,
Handelsman began to plant blueberries in a double spiral, he said, “that was a common image in the
Neolithic period.” First, he planted new bushes, then began using cuttings from those bushes.

The first spiral, more than 200 bushes in 10 varieties, is complete. He estimates it will take
15 more years to finish the second and 15 more for the maze to fully mature.